Canonicity may be the most important thing. dictionary.com defines “canon”, as relevant to this post: 3. the body of rules, principles, or standards accepted as axiomatic and universally binding in a field of study or art. The important qualification here is that in any field, in order to be canon, it has to be consistent …

The Humanity Experiment was supposed to be out in 2016, wasn’t it? And this is 2017 already, isn’t it? What happened? Well, aside from the usual delays that come about from the vagaries of real life, where there is a lot going on, there is a lot going on in the story. Heck, we have …

There have been a lot of jokes based upon the old expression, “I’m not myself today”. If your questionable identity should be any more than simply an adage, you would have to ask, then, who you actually are. Likewise, the idea has been the springboard for a lot of stories. Off the top of my …

Here in the early part of December, this year’s National Novel Writing Month, affectionately known as NaNoWriMo to participants, is fresh in my mind. I wrote Ik. Ik first saw the light of the real universe as a character in a role-playing game my brother-in-law invented. My first character, the one before her, was a …

Must be half demon if only half. She’s got a soul darker than the devil himself, and more fire and power, too. Notice how folks are scared to sit too close? … Pretty as an angel and quiet as smoke. But I can guarantee that you don’t want to find out what’s on the inside. …

3. the body of rules, principles, or standards accepted as axiomatic and universally binding in a field of study or art.

The important qualification here is that in any field, in order to be canon, it has to be consistent with itself. If one place says James T. Kirk was born in Iowa and other place says he was born on Vulcan, that can’t be canon.

That said, let me point out that the eighth Doctor doesn’t exist. He never did and he never will. “Wait!” shout Whovians from around the globe. “Yes, he does! He was played by Paul McGann.”

Before you Whovians get too bent out of shape, you should know that I’m one of you. The first companion I really, really liked was Zoe Heriot. You remember her, don’t you? My favorite T-shirt reads, “Keep calm and don’t blink”. You know what that’s about, of course. “Blink” vies for being the best episode ever written, right up there with “The Brain of Morbius” and “Enlightenment”. But none of that makes the eighth Doctor exist.

It’s all about canonicity, and the hypothetical eighth Doctor breaks it.

You see, I’m something most Whovians aren’t: a writer. With an estimated four million words under my belt (more than a million are available on Amazon), I have some experience locating and fixing plot holes, which are what you call broken canonicity on a smaller scale. Such as when I had Erik and Jaxidreshny hiking for days through the forest while she was carrying an instrument that could transport them light-years. After a while you get sensitive to those things. Don’t worry, that issue with Erik and Jaxidreshny is long since fixed.

Fans are usually pretty good at finding such holes, such as, “Why didn’t the Eagles just fly them to Mount Doom?” They usually can work out some kind of explanation to cover the hole, but it remains a good question. There even exists an argument that such was exactly what Gandalf told them to do in Moria when he said, “Fly, you fools!” But even dredging out those inconsistencies, fans are eager to accept everything they see without serious questions. After all, that’s the way it happened in the fictional world.

Doing so is quite a bit harder for a writer, who spends thousands of hours trying to get rid of exactly those issues. You can’t spend decades thinking about personalities, motives, emotions, what works and what doesn’t, then blindly accept what doesn’t work.

There are certain things you just don’t do. You don’t put Darth Vader in pink tights and a tutu unless you’re doing parody. You don’t have Captain Kirk totally screw up, destroying himself along with the Enterprise and ending the series prematurely. You don’t have Superman raping little girls. You don’t turn the interior of the TARDIS from a clean, functional design to a ghastly trash heap (which, unfortunately, they kept for the series reboot). You don’t suddenly make him half human when for 26 seasons he was faithfully and totally a Time Lord. You don’t bring back the Master as a creeping glob of snot. You don’t have a protagonist who could virtually ignore women he traveled the universe with suddenly go all goo-goo over a woman he just met. (What heterosexual male wouldn’t notice Zoe Heriot?)

To make matters worse, they started the new series with a “you don’t”. The Time Lords were all destroyed? Now, that’s news! How do you suppose that happened? Did all those Time Lords scattered throughout history just decide to return to Gallifrey at a certain moment in time so they could all conveniently be wiped out? It makes no sense! It is logically inconsistent with the 26 prior seasons. These aren’t Pacific Islanders in the 1800s; these are Time Lords. That may be the biggest Doctor Who gaffe of them all.

A piece by HPHarmioneF101 that I found on Fanpop, proof that J. K. Rowling and I are not the only ones who understand.

But Doctor Who is not what keeps me up at night grieving for the future of all that is sane. What does is the greatest canonicity busting faux pas ever to take place in the fictional world: Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger.

I rooted for Harry and Hermione as a couple from early in the first movie, and when I saw it going the wrong way in Goblet of Fire, I lapsed into denial and insisted it couldn’t be so. Reading the latter books nearly drove me into depression, and it had nothing to do with the fact that “Hermione Weasley” just sounds terrible. If you keep up on Harry Potter at all, you’ll know that Rowling later confessed to having made a mistake putting Ron and Hermione together:

“I wrote the Hermione/Ron relationship as a form of wish fulfillment. That’s how it was conceived, really. For reasons that have very little to do with literature and far more to do with me clinging to the plot as I first imagined it, Hermione ended up with Ron.”

“I know, I’m sorry,” she adds. “I can hear the rage and fury it might cause some fans, but if I’m absolutely honest, distance has given me perspective on that. It was a choice I made for very personal reasons, not for reasons of credibility. Am I breaking people’s hearts by saying this? I hope not.”

No, duh! But she’s a writer; she’d have to have noticed eventually. Attend to her comment, “…not for reasons of credibility.” She knows the Ron/Hermione hookup is not credible. It didn’t surprise me she made that admission, but it surprised me it took her so long. Erik and Jaxidreshny, whom I mentioned above, aren’t even the same species, come from worlds 117 million light-years apart, and have completely different societal structures and understanding of sex, yet they’re a more believable match than Ron and Hermione. Even if the ill-fated wizards made it to their vows, they never would have had children because they’d be casting Avada Kedavra at each other before they ever made it to bed. I’m surprised Rupert Grint and Emma Watson could play romantic scenes between them with straight faces. I knew it was Harry and Hermione from the moment they met on the train; it’s unfortunate the writer didn’t until it was too late.

A lot of fans exploded in claims of heresy over this, and some of them wrote articles picking through the interview to find a way to believe she didn’t really mean what she said. “Oh, Ron and Hermione will be all right with some counseling.” Like hell, they will! I’ve done some counseling. The incompatibility between them is not a matter of learned behavior, of anything that would benefit from psychoanalysis. It’s a basic clash between their personalities, and no amount of counseling is going to change that.

Ron and Luna would have worked; they’re compatibly loopy. Ginny would have worked with either Neville or Dean.

So all this leaves me with a problem. If I accept the nonsensical parts as written, I can’t really enjoy the story. Rule number one in fiction: don’t break the suspension of disbelief. And baby, the cases I’ve mentioned break it big time, more than fourth wall gags. They scream with the volume of Krakatoa that this is a STORY and someone flubbed the plot. In order to enjoy it, to pretend it’s real, to immerse myself in it, I have to mentally edit out the parts that don’t add up and where necessary replace them with something that does. That scene on the Hogwarts Express platform at the end of Deathly Hallows had to have arisen from Hermione (Harry’s wife) and Luna (Ron’s wife) taking polyjuice potion as a practical joke on their husbands, which makes a lot more sense than Ron and Hermione discovering mutual tolerance. I have to omit the eighth Doctor and ignore that nonsense about the Time Lords being destroyed. Not to do so ruins everything for me because they demolish the credibility of the story line.

It’s more than just “I wouldn’t have written it that way”. Under that category is that I would have had Draco suffer more serious consequences from his death-eating days, and I probably would have hooked him up with Pansy if I hadn’t had Hermione kill him in battle. I would have had Voldemort hide his horcruxes in more secure locations, such as the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Those details don’t constitute gaping plot holes, so they’re not that big a deal. Putting Ron and Hermione together is. You can’t carefully develop their personalities over the course of seven volumes and finish it up with, “But let’s forget all that. It was a joke.”

So I’m just wondering. Is anyone else compelled to fix broken plots in their mind to avoid terminal insanity?

The Humanity Experiment was supposed to be out in 2016, wasn’t it? And this is 2017 already, isn’t it? What happened?

Well, aside from the usual delays that come about from the vagaries of real life, where there is a lot going on, there is a lot going on in the story. Heck, we have matter simulations, reality experiments, a thought transducer, precognition and telepathy, an evil galactic empire (there’s always an evil galactic empire), third- and fifth-order wands, bizarre aliens, saturation plasma bombing, ancient artifacts with mysteries to go with them, inter-dimensional transport, unseen forces, an impossible entity called Companion, synthetic human consciousness, torture, intergalactic teleportation, battleships, traitors, ghosts, near-death experiences, jimimbas, children who appear and disappear, the Plekton Key, and love. But all that’s easy.

When people fall in love, however, it often leads to sex. That, normall, is pretty easy, too. I don’t write much sex because by itself it doesn’t make for much of a story, and when it does make a story, it’s not my kind of story. I have zero interest in reading Fifty Shades of Grey, so it’s not likely I would have ever written it. Still, I’ve known since my initial conception of the series that this would be the book with most of the sex in it.

The inter-species romance in A Hierarchy of Gods gave me no trouble because the Trarsani, for all their differences, see love and sex pretty much the same way humans do, so once you overcome any anatomical challenges, it’s smooth sailing. But the Kyattoni…. Hold onto your ever-loving hat! Here we have a race who have multiple sexual partners but are lifetime monogamous, who don’t clearly distinguish between adult and child because they have no life event matching puberty, who have multiple kinds of orgasms, whose names are broken down to signal different combinations of intimacy and pregnancy. We have Erik and Jaxidreshny, but we also have Jaxidreshny’s kid sister Triknikanthy, which makes Erik and Triknikanthy girl-linked bond-siblings, and that’s a whole adventure in itself. When a human says, “it’s complicated”, they’re usually trying to get out of something. To a Kyattoni, it really is complicated. And for a human trying to understand it…. Poor guy! The ethics Erik learned growing up human are at best useless, and sometimes harmful.

On the other hand, it’s not just the sex. As Triknikanthy explains,

“…but even so it’s not really about the sex. Well, it is, but…. Most TKK species can separate sex from love.” She looked into his eyes for a moment in a strange, alien kind of union that transmitted messages he couldn’t understand. “We can’t.”

Love is a paraphysical quantity, Jaxidreshny tells him, constant under a certain set of philosophical transforms, something real, not just an experience. Love is love across the universe, but Kyattoni bond-love turns up the gain on that to superhuman levels. There is an awful lot for the lovers to work out between them as they come to understand each other, and as the writer, I have to work all that out too.

Yes, The Humanity Experiment is written. It has been for a few years. Over those years it has been through more revision passes than I can keep count of. I don’t want it to be merely written, I want it written right. I have page after page after page of documentation from anatomical drawings to sexual terminology, from psychobiology to social structures, and I’m still not confident I have all the loose ends accounted for. I hate loose ends. I’ve run across inter-species sex before in science fiction, but most of it stops at “That’s exotic!” Oh, the angle is different and she has too many teeth (I forget what book that was), but no investigation into what happens when fundamental biology, psychology, and culture were never intended to mesh. Sarek and Amanda have it easy by comparison.

But never fear; I’m still working on it. As you can see, I’ve done more than a little 3D modelling and composition. It might be a little late, but I’m hoping the wait is worth it.

There have been a lot of jokes based upon the old expression, “I’m not myself today”. If your questionable identity should be any more than simply an adage, you would have to ask, then, who you actually are. Likewise, the idea has been the springboard for a lot of stories. Off the top of my head, I can think of several episodes of The Twilight Zone from the 1960s that took advantage of the possibility: “A world of Difference”, “Mirror Image”, “Person or Persons Unknown”, “The Four of Us Are Dying”, “Five Characters in Search of an Exit”, “Death Ship”. There are probably more, but my memory is finite. And I can think of an episode of the The Outer Limits (the original; I was never crazy about the HBO clone except for a couple of episodes), not where someone doesn’t know who he is, but where no one else does: “One Hundred Days of the Dragon”, and one where two people exchanged minds: “The Human Factor”. Identity is pretty flexible in the world of speculative fiction.

If you’re not yourself, then there are only so many options. You’re somebody else. Somebody else is you. You’re dead and don’t know it (“Death Ship”). You’re a duplicate of the original without knowing it. And I suppose possibilities with no real explanation, like “Mirror Image”. Welcome to the world of cybertech, where we have options that didn’t exist during the ’60s: you’re a computer simulation (think “Matrix”) or a computer game character (think any of dozens of anime). In fact, scientists and philosophers are seriously considering the possibility that we arecomputer simulations.

But wait, the possibilities are not exhausted yet. I used this quote from Korvoros in another post of this series dedicated to teleportation, but let me repeat it here:

“So let’s proceed to utter insanity,” she continued. “If the information is all that’s important, suppose that two receiving stations happened to pick up the signal and each one makes a new instance of you. Which would be the real one? Or would either of them really be you? You could be dead and they could be fakes that no one could tell from the original because all the memories are duplicated too.”

So you haven’t traveled by teleporter lately? Well, you’re not off the hook. Suppose that every time you have even the slightest impure thought, your soul is immediately sent to hell, whereupon another soul with all your memories immediately takes its place. You could be 270,000th “you”, just waiting for that impure thought to send you away. Since all the memories are duplicated, how could you possibly know? Since you’re exactly the same, how could anyone else possibly know? Maybe the impure thought isn’t necessary. Maybe we’re all rebooted once a second regardless of what passes through our minds and our “true” identity lasts no longer than that.

One of my short stories that I haven’t finished involves a police investigator who is actually one of a series of robots created by other robots to replace living people, only a defect in the manufacturing left the first run not knowing they were duplicates.

So you woke up this morning with the smug assumption that you are the same person you were last night. You can’t be so sure of that, can you? That person could be gone forever.

From this point, let your mind wander. Is there some other way you might not be you? Some way that I’ve overlooked? If so, I’d be interested to hear about it.

Here in the early part of December, this year’s National Novel Writing Month, affectionately known as NaNoWriMo to participants, is fresh in my mind. I wrote Ik. Ik first saw the light of the real universe as a character in a role-playing game my brother-in-law invented. My first character, the one before her, was a rather non-original sword-and-sorcery type barbarian whose name I don’t remember, but mundaneness is what happens when you have to create a character in a matter of minutes.

Ik, Iznik the Destroyer, Kolaika Jinnlexa Kälienen came later, after I had time for my imagination to ruminate: something truly bizarre: an unassuming, frail-looking little girl who could be your worst nightmare, with the power to inflict ultimate agony with a mere thought. She possessed some unusual magic, too, but that didn’t make it into a science fiction novel. There, instead, she flies a stolen enemy starship.

I never actually played Ik in the game, but it dawned on me at some point that her story could make a cool novel. I had a very rough outline for years, but as I’m a productive pantser (those who write by the seat of their pants with minimal plotting ahead of time) the story came together quite well as November progressed.

One of Ik’s prominent features is that her mother had been a Golden Aura telepath. She would have been one, too, very usual in the next generation. Thus, her mind developed in constant awareness of adult consciousness, and so was born with an adult cognitive ability. She’s 11 years old, but able to talk and reason like a college professor. She was born with knowledge of space travel, weapons, sex, and exactly who the enemy was that she needed to destroy. And she was acutely aware of why she needs to fear puberty.

Now suppose that the next child you meet has such a mind. Let’s say a six-year-old, who understands advanced mathematics, military strategy, social psychology, electronics and other technology, and has the clear understanding why she has to keep her true nature secret.

How could you know? Might she, like Ik, possess telepathic powers that allow her to manipulate your mind? If you were a child molester, would she deal with you as ruthlessly as Ik does? Could she manage to play the role of an innocent child? Would she have to ability to cope with adolescent emotions? What if she can’t? If she’s evil, of course, you have a problem, and generally, evil children make for more thrilling movies.

If she’s basically good, you probably don’t have a problem, or do you? Ik’s prime directive is justice, but she’s messed up, with a demon inside you can’t imagine. She’s not entirely stable, prone to fits of rage and perverting justice into vengeance. She doesn’t hide her power, so even after saving Tockmulle on multiple occasions, the townsfolk remain terrified of her.

So there’s that little girl you just met. Six years old. Your mental equal or perhaps your superior, playing with dolls and erector sets just to throw you off. She’s manipulating your life, controlling your thoughts and actions, and you don’t have a clue. You might be reading this blog because she sent you here for some cryptic purpose.

Is she good or evil?

Ik is not completely original, it turns out. I didn’t copy her from any particular character, nor did I think of any others as I was writing, but I suspect writers retain a lot in their subconscious minds that influence their writing. After the fact, I thought of other such characters in science fiction.

Alia Atreides, from the Dune series by Frank Herbert. She got to be the way she was from effects of the spice, not telepathic linkage, but she’s nearly as dangerous as Ik. Alia, like most of Herbert’s characters, ends up psycho.

Jimmy Holden, from The Fourth R (a.k.a. The Brain Machine) by George. O. Smith. He got his adult mind through an education machine his parents invented, and has to use that ability to hide from his godfather, who’s trying to get the plans from him before murdering him.

Ik might fit right in here, though she wears white and is completely human and scarier. It could be these children were a subconscious inspiration for her.

The half-alien children in Village of the Damned. I cite the 1960 original because it’s vastly superior to the 1995 knock-off. They’re not exactly evil (or are they?) but they’re absolutely ruthless and unforgiving when it comes to protecting the project, whatever it is. Of all these, they’re probably the most like Ik in temperament, though individually much weaker in power.

I’m sitting here trying to think of other examples. I’m sure they’re there, but they’re not coming to mind. I’m not counting ordinary evil kids like Rhoda and Damien or mere geniuses like Peewee. Can you help me out? What others are there?

Will you ever look at your own kids the same way? The next child you see might be that one you need to fear….

Must be half demon if only half. She’s got a soul darker than the devil himself, and more fire and power, too. Notice how folks are scared to sit too close? … Pretty as an angel and quiet as smoke. But I can guarantee that you don’t want to find out what’s on the inside.

That’s how Kilmor first describes Kolaika Jinnlexa Kälienen of Torprällin to the warrior Gurk. Of course, no one calls her that; they call her “Ik”, a contraction of “Iznik, the Destroyer.” And you most emphatically do not want to fuck with her.

My first rendering of the ghost-like Ik in a random environment. I can’t seem to give her a scary enough look.

You should run from her into the arms of Freddy Kreuger. Ask Pinhead for protection. Go on a date with Jason or Michael Myers in hopes she won’t know where you are. That’s if you’re a person who hurts others. If not, well breathe easy, she might even save your life. Either way, you do not want to try to hurt her. You. Will. Regret. It.

Ik is one of my many strong girl characters, but one much more frightening than most. She can inflict pain so brutal that it lies beyond the bounds of human imagination. Terror so penetrating it drives out all sanity. Despair so dismal that Azkaban’s dementors can only aspire to her level. And other dark emotions to which mankind has never even given a name as they are not natural to humans. She does this with a thought, and you can be 100 miles away. Gurk only experienced her wrath for a second, but during that time, if she had allowed him, he would have gladly cast himself into hell to find relief.

She uses this hellish power with enthusiasm against the cruel Blorzong. It is her goal to track down every last one and torture them to death. She is fully human, except that one foreign essence inside, and 11 years old. She speaks several galactic languages fluently, handles exotic weapons from multiple worlds, and flies a Blorzong playship.

How she came to possess such a faculty is left a mystery through most of the book, but it does have to do with the Blorzong themselves and why she hates them so much. To avoid giving it away, I’ve included the explanation in a spoiler block for those who have to know right away.

It all began six weeks after she was conceived. The Blorzong had been to her world before, but they came again, looking for a victim. They liked Torprällin because it is relatively rich in telepaths, and telepaths enhance their excitement and joy at inflicting torture. Ik’s mother was not just a telepath, but a Golden Aura telepath, and that promised the juiciest fulfillment of their torture lust.

Moments later, she was clamped into the mind rape, the most devilish torture device ever conceived by any species in the known universe. It inflicts physical agony and emotional anguish far, far beyond what any biological brain is naturally capable of experiencing. On top of that is psychweed, which alone can drive a person mad. Physical torture above and beyond the mind rape, enhanced by touchweed, and inflicted continuously as the regenerators repair damaged flesh so that it can be sliced, burned, or torn away again.

The Blorzong knew she was pregnant, and planned to allow the child to be born and to grow to the age where it could understand torture. But they miscalculated. Miscalculated severely, not foreseeing what could happen. Lena Jinnlexa Kälienen was a Golden Aura telepath. Although very unusual in successive generations, Kolaika Jinnlexa Kälienen would have been one, too. The child’s mind developed beneath the mind rape, in a pool of psychweed and touchweed, experiencing every iota of that infinite agony that her mother did. The mind rape and all the added enhancements became part of her as her mind appeared, and is her constant companion every moment of every day and night. Torment no less than that of any of the Blorzong’s victims, but torment she assimilated, torment she could handle. No amount of pain that can be naturally applied can compete with that.

And having the ability of a Golden Aura telepath, she can share it with others. What happened to those particular Blorzong at the hands of a six-month-old with near-adult mental faculty is material for the book. Iznik is a Blorzong word, first applied to her by one of those first two of her victims, and she thought it fit. Destroyer.

She would destroy them all. They would suffer as they had made others suffer.

Gurk, as a fearsome warrior, is dismayed that she is mentally tougher than he. He is horrified that she has killed more than he. He cannot touch her with his sword, as she anticipates his every move before he moves. He watches her hold a broken arm in the fire until her hand is blackened and cracked without crying out, without wincing, with no expression whatsoever.

When she asks him to go with her to help her punish Blorzong, he agrees. He knows she has a terrible power and is undefeatable in battle. Those skills he hopes to learn for himself, but he has no concept of what he is getting into.

This is what I want to write for NaNoWriMo this year. If I have time. I’m spending a lot of time in classrooms now. Wish me luck.

It occurs to me that Ik looks quite a bit like Ashley in The Emperor’s Daughter. Ashley has more golden blond hair, shorter, somewhat wavy, and blue eyes not nearly as startling. She is a few months older. But she has a power of a different sort. Maybe that’s why I sometimes get those two confused.